Having avidly pursued Ezra Pound's injunction to seek the great men of his time, Jonathan Williams travelled to Venice in 1966 to photograph Pound himself. The botched fascist is arrayed in profile, dreaming old men's silences, the angular features shrunken, the background palazzo a receding blur.

Vivid, spare and sympathetic, it instantly casts itself as a signature Williams portrait, shot with a Rolleiflex and sensitised by an understanding of the spatial fields of the Bauhaus and abstract expressionism, the two poles of Black Mountain College which shaped the intelligence of this unique American poet, photographer and publisher, who has died aged 79.

Williams was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and raised in Washington DC. Early exposure to works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Blake, Georges Rouault and Michel de Montaigne quickened him to the possibilities of "word and image, how to put them together, how to print and publish - it all began to heat slowly on the back burner." Late romanticism in music and paintings drew him into "celebrating human difference", boyhood collections of Indian relics and Georgia mountain minerals precipitating later gatherings of "strays and mavericks, those afflicted with both vision and craft".

At 12 he began to draw at St Albans prep school in Washington DC. A slow homosexual awakening followed, as did his elegant dress sense - worsted and flannels for life. He entered Princeton in 1948 but quit after a year, "sick of all those rich boys" and having no desire "to live in the world of competitive business".

More fertile ground was covered through studies in painting with Karl Knaths at the Phillips Gallery in Washington DC, and engraving with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Greenwich Village, New York, followed by a semester at the Chicago Institute of Design and a spell in the medical corps. But his pivotal year was 1951, which marked his arrival at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. "All cohered, as Pound promised it would," he recalled. "Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind taught me the rudiments of the camera; [Charles] Olson was the largest poet known to man, the energiser who taught me the importance of the writer's press, a self-initiating process that could let you do what you wanted to in the aesthetic realm. 'EACH MAN IS HIS OWN INSTRUMENT!' Olson sang out."

That year he founded the Jargon Society Press as a means of keeping "afloat the Ark of Culture in these dark and tacky times!" More than 100 volumes and broadsides surfaced, among them seminal works of the avant-garde by Olson, Paul Metcalf, Lorine Niedecker, Mina Loy, Joel Oppenheimer, Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky, Michael McClure and Buckminster Fuller, each one impeccably crafted for Williams' own pleasure. Jargon's sole commercial success was White Trash Cooking, a collection of recipes and photographs drawn from the "last frontier" of inter-national cuisine by Ernest Matthew Mickler, including such borderline inedibles as rack of spam and the anti-stick peanut butter sandwich. Williams was delighted by a Vogue review that credited the book for "seeing clearly, without condescension".

This remark runs smartly into his own writing, which suggested that the boundary between the great figures of American modernism and the unknown poets of Appalachian vernacular was porous, if it existed at all. Listening out for the poem within the daily routine of life, Williams revelled in wild yarns, puns and the found language of hill folk, declaring it his "business to raise 'the common' to grace; to pay very close attention to the earthy". His "Meta-Fours" are exemplary; energies emerge cleanly and conversationally, forging an entire world-vision by transforming nonsense into sense.

The following is an excerpt taken from Amuse-Gueules for Bemused Ghouls:

Homage to Lee smith

one-eyed jessewaldronlives all by hissefup in the paw-paw gap

*

justinepoolealways says fuckin' is fine as far as it goes

two jewishladies meet in central park one of them has a new baby in a carriage what's the baby's name says one it's shelleysays the other how nice that you named her after a famous poet shelleytemple was a famous poet

Williams first visited England with his then companion, the poet and food writer Ronald Johnson, in 1962, hiking across the country in search of all things "most rich, most glittering, most strange", and characteristically befriending scores of poets. In 1969 he put down roots in Cumbria, spending his summers in a 17th-century shepherd's cottage in Dentdale, and his winters at Skywinding Farm in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina.

His ruralism no doubt contributed to his neglect. He had little appetite for institutional or literary coteries, preferring a life of ecological sanity with his partner of 40 years, Tom Meyer, another fine poet and gastronome.

Of the most recent of 50 books published under his name, Jubilant Thicket (2004) collects more than 1,000 of his poems, while Blackbird Dust (2000) and A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (2002) weave an "epicurean knot garden of enthusiasms", summing up a generation of gifted outriders that has now all but gone. "I tend to dart and swoop, and interlace one rinceau after another," he said of his work. "So the trick is to slow down, focus, concentrate. Someone said that craft is perfected attention, or as Pound in Canto LXXXI says so gloriously: 'What thou lovest well remains,/the rest is dross ...'"

· Jonathan Chamberlain Williams, poet, publisher and photographer, born March 8 1929; died March 16 2008